How to add a vacation responder when you are away
Overview
Planning a vacation? Create a vacation responder to automatically reply to your customers while you're gone.
Instructions
Step 1
Go to Settings, select Message templates, then Vacation responders, and Add a vacation responder.
Step 2
Give your vacation responder a name, and complete the rest of the fields. Be sure to only enable the responder before you leave. Vacation responders are for individual inboxes only. See this article on how to create an out of office reply for team inboxes.
Note: If you choose to schedule the vacation responder, the end date is the last day you want the vacation responder to trigger.
Step 3
Write your message and click Create. You can also use variables that will be replaced dynamically.
How it works
On your specified Start date, any inbound message sent to the channel you've specified in your vacation responder's settings will begin receiving your vacation responder's message as a reply. The vacation responder will automatically stop sending after your specified End date. If needed, you can can toggle off Enable during any period in order to pause the vacation responder.
If you have multiple private channels, you can select more than one channel in your vacation responder's settings, or you can create separate vacation responders for different channels.
Exceptions to vacation responder
Was the inbound message auto-generated?
Front will not send any vacation responder auto-responses to auto-generated messages
Has the recipient already received that vacation responder within the last 4 days?
Front will send vacation responder messages to a recipient at most once every 4 days.
Reasons why a vacation responder might not reply
A vacation responder may fail to reply to messages. There are two reasons why this might happen:
- The inbound message was auto-generated. Front will not send any auto-responses to auto-generated messages.
- That recipient received your vacation responder message within the last 4 days. Front will only your send vacation responder to a recipient at most once every 4 days.
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Is there any way to add a signature to the auto replies? I would have assumed the default signature would be used, or that the signatures would be variables that were available within the reply templates. But neither of those things seem to work.
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Cam Hi there,
Currently, signatures aren't included in auto-replies because there's no way to know who the sender is.
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Hi Cori Morris . The Individual responses are set per user. So surely then there should be a signature. No?
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Cam When you send from a team inbox, it could be anyone from the team. So, there's no way to know who is sending.
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Cori Morris I'm using the "Me > My Responses > Vacation responders" setting. So the system does know who the sender is.
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Cam Oh, a vacation responder. Sorry, I thought you meant an auto-reply via rules. Same goes with the vacation responders. You'll need to input a signature in the responder because our signatures aren't linked to these yet.
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Cori Morris Sorry about the confusion. I tried adding a signature to the responder, but it sent as raw text instead. How would one usually go about adding the signature?
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Cam There's no way to use HTML in vacation responders right now.
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Cori Morris I thought that might be the case. Thanks. It would be great if there was an option to switch your default signature on or off on your vacation responders.
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Cam Agreed! I will share this request with our product team. Thanks!
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Cori Morris Awesome. Thanks Cori!
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Hi Cori Morris is it possible to set an out of office responder for the whole team (for example when it is a public holiday) rather than having to have everyone mark themselves as unavailable before the rule works? Thanks!
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Marilia Salvia-Teixeira You can set a team auto responder by creating a team rule. The rule can follow a structure that looks like this "WHEN inbound message, IF inbox is X + day is saturday and sunday, THEN reply with - auto reply"
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Has there been any progress on adding a feature that allows setting a signature/From name for vacation responders or Rule auto replies? Also, when sending a reply via a rule, it is adding a 2nd "Re:" to the subject line, so it says "Re: Re: Subject". Why is this?
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SPG We have not made any progress on this yet. It is on our roadmap, though. Regarding the "Re:" addition to the subject line, it appears we prepend our own without checking the existing subject. I'll share this feedback with the team.
